Elmore Leonard is 80 today.
“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip” — one of Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing.
Elmore has written a serial novel for the New York Times Sunday Magazine which will appear in the magazine between September 18 and December 18, 2005. The first chapter is, “The Hanging of Willi Martz.” The setting is Camp Deep Fork, a German POW camp in October, 1944 outside of Okmulgee, Oklahoma where a couple thousand of the hundreds of thousands of German POWS imprisoned in America during the war are kept. Carl Webster (from The Hot Kid, Elmore’s latest hardcover novel) is sent to investigate a death in the camp. Was it suicide or murder?
(If you hadn’t guessed, yes, NewMexiKen is an Elmore Leonard fan.)